Gorilla’s Guides

Baghdad, Dec 16, (VOI) – Dozens of Iraqi teachers took to the streets on Sunday morning in central Baghdad’s al-Fardous Square and other Iraqi provinces demanding an equal place with their counterparts in Iraq’s Kurdistan region.

“Dozens of Iraqi teachers from all over Iraq demonstrated in al-Fardous Square in central Baghdad, calling on the Ministry of Education to increase their salaries along the lines of their colleagues in Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region,” the head of the Baghdad-based Teachers’ Syndicate, Jasim Hussein al-Kaabi, who partook in the demonstration, told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).

“The demonstrators submitted their demands to cabinet officials who vowed to study the requests,” al-Kaabi indicated.

“A delegation of teachers will be assigned to negotiate our legitimate demands with the prime ministry,” he noted.

Meanwhile, the deputy head of the Teachers’ Syndicate, Burhan Nema, said, “We rejected all forms of support from several parties, institutions and association because we are affiliated with a state-run institution.”

According to figures released by the education ministry, Iraqi teachers receive a monthly salary of 200,000-550,000 Iraqi dinars (1 U.S. dollar= 1,117 Iraqi dinars), while teachers in Kurdistan earn 280,000-750,000 dinars a month.

In the central Iraqi province of Wassit, local teachers staged a huge strike, urging the central Iraqi government to put them on equal terms with Kurdistan’s teachers.

A representative for the syndicate in Wassit, Asaad Mahmoud Sahour, told VI that members from all educational institutions took part in the strike. “Teachers showed up in schools this morning but did not give any classes,” Sahour explained.

“A delegation of 150 teachers took part in the sit-in carried out in Baghdad’s al-Fardous Square, threatening to go on an indefinite strike if their demands are not met,” he added.

Speaking to VOI, director of al-Hijra Elementary School in Tikrit, Hassan Nasir, said, “Till when will teachers’ financial status remain the lowest in society?”

Aswat Aliraq

We hear a lot about the “new” imperialism these days. Indeed, it’s become somewhat of an intellectual fad. Pundits, political commentators, and even professors have been busy debating the “new” Anglo-American empire. The one that spontaneously burst into existence sometime after 9/11, probably around the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Volumes of academic verbiage along with pages of distilled analytical wisdom are poured into efforts to try and understand whether this “new” empire is good or bad for the world. Occasionally, we get a little bit of criticism of the failures of Bush and his neoconservative ideologues. Consistently left out of the debate is, of course, the existence of an overwhelmingly enormous Elephant occupying the Living Room of intellectual freedom.

What is this Elephant, and from whence does it come?

This Elephant symbolises that rather difficult subject matter known as the Brute Facts of History, the absence of which is what permits mainstream commentators to pontificate endlessly in a manner that serves not to illuminate, but to obscure.

Ignoring the Brute Facts of History, unfortunately, is integral to Western political culture. It permits a war for oil and power based on genocide to be paraded as exporting democracy and protecting security; it allows the systematisation and globalisation of mass death to be legitimised as necessary violence in the service of life itself. Western political culture survives on such methods of misinformation. For suppressing History is precisely how Western imperial power legitimises its violence.

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For the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq was by no means the beginning of the Anglo-American imperial turn. On the contrary, the 2003 Iraq War constituted merely a new phase in a series of prolonged regional interventions from which the 2003 trajectory of Anglo-American power cannot be abstracted if it is to be fully understood.

[snip]

With this in mind, we will begin by reviewing Western engagement with Iraq as a continuous historical process consisting of considerable instances of systematic imperial violence, which frequently included episodes that were genocidal. If this argument is accurate in highlighting 1) the continuity of imperial relations between the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries 2) the potentially genocidal impact of Anglo-American military and social policies in Iraq; then we have established the case for a fundamental re-think of our understanding of contemporary international relations. We will proceed by dividing the Iraqi Holocaust into four major historical phases, which we discuss in chronological order.

Phase 1 – The “Arab Façade”